Friday, April 12, 2013

It’s been quite some time since I last updated this blog but
it hasn’t been without good reason. My program always keeps me busy, especially
near the end of the semester when crunch time is highest in order to finish our
GDW game. But now its finally over, my 3rd year and final GDW game
ever is complete. I may have briefly mentioned what it was in a previous post
but that was so long ago I wouldn’t even have remembered writing it.

All sorts of events happened before the final submission to UOIT such as LevelUp where students from U of T, OCAD, UOIT and others showed off their games to the public.In fact our game even got an honorable mention as well! There was our own UOIT event called Gamecon where the game devs from all years would show off the almost final versions of our games and capstone projects. I'll cover both of these in a later blog but for now lets get to what my team's game is.

Apparently there was a movie
called Reddawn that came out before we named our game. We had no idea
what it was. Moving on from that though, our game is a ship to ship combat game
with a heavy emphasis on multiplayer and looks like Windwaker. Players will
control one ship, sailing in a battleground with several other ships and your
objective is to destroy them. There are multiple different modes to choose from
such as death match, timed matches and last man standing matches as well as
multiple different levels to select.

Controls

The most important part of the game is how do you control
your ship? You can increase your speed or decrease your speed which increase
your movement but inversely decrease your turn rate. The faster you go, the
harder it is to turn. You also don’t have to hold a button to increase your
speed. Once you are at a certain speed it won’t change unless you to choose to
increase or decrease.

We wanted to make it feel like a ship, so that meant you
weren’t just shooting some machine gun in whatever direction you were pointed.
Since ships have stationary placement for cannons on the sides of the ships, that’s
how you shoot. You control the left and right sides of your ship with the Xbox
Controller triggers. Left trigger would fire cannons on the left side and right
cannons would fire cannons on the right side. The same applies for
flamethrowers located on the sides of your ship.

You also have access to a harpoon at the front of the ship
that fires forward. If it connects with another ship, the two of you will be
dragged towards each other, allowing you to do some weird physics defying
drifts to aim your cannons in cool and interesting ways. Its used as a chasing
tool for those pesky ships that try and run away from you. You also have access
to mines that deploy from the rear of the ship. They do massive amounts of
damage and you can leave up to 8 on the field at any time.

How to win

When you select a new game it brings up a menu that allows
you to customize the match in any way you see fit. The main types of modes are
deathmatch, life match (last man standing) and timed match. You can also choose
how many AI you want to fight against, if it’s a team battle and also what
level you want to go to.

For the modes, deathmatch is the typical get X number of
kills to win. Last man standing is where you have a pool of lives which run out
as you get killed. If you lose too many lives you’re out of the match. Timed
match runs a set time and every kill you get gains you a point while every
death nets a loss ofa point. So 7 kills, 5 deaths = 2+ points.

When a match ends your stats will be displayed, which are
your kills, deaths, and team. A good way to compare yourself to the
competition.

Multiplayer

I said the game was multiplayer so that means playing with
your friends. This GDW year we had the opportunity to learn networking in our
games and so that applied perfectly with the concept for ours. You can connect
on local LAN to other computers who have the game (unfortunately we didn’t
learn how to connect across the internet though). All you have to do is have
someone set up a Red Dawn server, have people connect to that person’s IP
address and “Board the Ship” to establish connection.

Due to time constraints its not as user friendly as it
should be but it still works quite well once you’re in. You can setup a match
just like in singleplayer mode for everyone else in the lobby if you’re the
first one to connect. You can chat before match and once everyone presses the
ready up button, the match will start. It will even keep track of your wins and
losses when you return back to the multiplayer lobby.

DOWNLOAD

That’s a basic overview of our game. I have made it
available for download for anyone that would like to try it. There is a
download link above and right here.